Eastern Standard Tribe – Day 1 of 64

Eastern Standard Tribe

Cory Doctorow

A note about this book:

Last year, in January 2003, my first novel came out. I was 31
years old, and I’d been calling myself a novelist since the
age of 12. It was the storied dream-of-a-lifetime,
come-true-at-last. I was and am proud as hell of that book, even
though it is just one book among many released last year, better
than some, poorer than others; and even though the print-run (which
sold out very quickly!) though generous by science fiction
standards, hardly qualifies it as a work of mass entertainment.

The thing that’s extraordinary about that first novel is
that it was released under terms governed by a Creative Commons license that
allowed my readers to copy the book freely and distribute it far
and wide. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the book were made and
distributed this way. Hundreds of thousands.

Today, I release my second novel, and my third, a
collaboration with Charlie Stross is due any day, and
two
more are under contract. My career as a novelist is now well
underway—in other words, I am firmly afoot on a long road
that stretches into the future: my future, science fiction’s
future, publishing’s future and the future of the world.

The future is my business, more or less. I’m a science
fiction writer. One way to know the future is to look good and hard
at the present. Here’s a thing I’ve noticed about the
present: more people are reading more words off of more
screens than ever before. Here’s another thing
I’ve noticed about the present: fewer people are
reading fewer words off of fewer pages than ever before.
That doesn’t mean that the book is dying—no
more than the advent of the printing press and the de-emphasis of
Bible-copying monks meant that the book was dying—but it does
mean that the book is changing. I think that literature is
alive and well: we’re reading our brains out! I just think
that the complex social practice of “book”—of
which a bunch of paper pages between two covers is the mere
expression—is transforming and will transform further.

I intend on figuring out what it’s transforming into. I
intend on figuring out the way that some writers—that
this writer, right here, wearing my underwear—is going
to get rich and famous from his craft. I intend on figuring out how
this writer’s words can become part of the social
discourse, can be relevant in the way that literature at its best
can be.

I don’t know what the future of book looks like. To figure
it out, I’m doing some pretty basic science. I’m
peering into this opaque, inscrutable system of publishing as it
sits in the year 2004, and I’m making a perturbation.
I’m stirring the pot to see what surfaces, so that I can see
if the system reveals itself to me any more thoroughly as it roils.
Once that happens, maybe I’ll be able to formulate an
hypothesis and try an experiment or two and maybe—just
maybe—I’ll get to the bottom of book-in-2004 and beat
the competition to making it work, and maybe I’ll go home
with all (or most) of the marbles.

It’s a long shot, but I’m a pretty sharp guy, and I
know as much about this stuff as anyone out there. More to the
point, trying stuff and doing research yields a non-zero chance of
success. The alternatives—sitting pat, or worse, getting into
a moral panic about “piracy” and accusing the readers
who are blazing new trail of “the moral equivalent of
shoplifting”—have a zero percent chance of
success.

Most artists never “succeed” in the sense of
attaining fame and modest fortune. A career in the arts is a risky
long-shot kind of business. I’m doing what I can to sweeten
my odds.

So here we are, and here is novel number two, a book called
Eastern Standard Tribe, which you can walk into shops all over the
world and buy as a
physical artifact—a very nice physical artifact, designed
by Chesley-award-winning art director Irene Gallo and her designer
Shelley Eshkar, published by Tor Books, a huge, profit-making arm
of an enormous, multinational publishing concern. Tor is watching
what happens to this book nearly as keenly as I am, because
we’re all very interested in what the book is turning
into.

To that end, here is the book as a non-physical artifact. A
file. A bunch of text, slithery bits that can cross the world in an
instant, using the Internet, a tool designed to copy things very
quickly from one place to another; and using personal computers,
tools designed to slice, dice and rearrange collections of bits.
These tools demand that their users copy and slice and
dice—rip, mix and burn!—and that’s what I’m
hoping you will do with this.

Not (just) because I’m a swell guy, a big-hearted slob.
Not because Tor is run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have
been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because
you—the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers—hold
in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing.
Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody’s got a novel in her or
him. Readers are a precious commodity. You’ve got all the
money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network
that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten,
and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its
author, changing the world in some meaningful way.

I’m unashamedly exploiting your imagination. Imagine me a
new practice of book, readers. Take this novel and pass it from
inbox to inbox, through your IM clients, over P2P networks. Put it
on webservers. Convert it to weird, obscure ebook formats. Show
me—and my colleagues, and my publisher—what the future
of book looks like.

I’ll keep on writing them if you keep on reading them. But
as cool and wonderful as writing is, it’s not half so cool as
inventing the future. Thanks for helping me do it.

Here’s a summary of the license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0
Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute,
display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the
original author credit.
No Derivative Works. The licensor permits others to copy,
distribute, display and perform only unaltered copies of the work
—not derivative works based on it.
Noncommercial. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute,
display, and perform the work. In return, licensees may not use
the work for commercial purposes—unless they get the
licensor’s permission.

Dedication

For my parents.

For my family.

For everyone who helped me up and for everyone I let down. You
know who you are. Sincerest thanks and most heartfelt
apologies.

Cory

1.

I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference
between Chinese and Western medicine thus: “Western medicine
is based on corpses, things that you discover by cutting up dead
bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese medicine is based on living
flesh, things observed from vital, moving humans.”

The explanation, like all good propaganda, is stirring and
stilted, and not particularly accurate, and gummy as the hook from
a top-40 song, sticky in your mind in the sleep-deprived noontime
when the world takes on a hallucinatory hypperreal clarity. Like
now as I sit here in my underwear on the roof of a sanatorium in
the back woods off Route 128, far enough from the perpetual
construction of Boston that it’s merely a cloud of dust like
a herd of distant buffalo charging the plains. Like now as I sit
here with a pencil up my nose, thinking about homebrew lobotomies
and wouldn’t it be nice if I gave myself one.

Deep breath.

The difference between Chinese medicine and Western medicine is
the dissection versus the observation of the thing in motion. The
difference between reading a story and studying a story is the
difference between living the story and killing the story and
looking at its guts.

School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories
that I’d escaped into, laid open their abdomens and tagged
their organs, covered their genitals with polite sterile drapes,
recorded dutiful notes en masse that told us what the
story was about, but never what the story was. Stories are
propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and
insert themselves directly into your emotions. Kill them and cut
them open and they’re as naked as a nightclub in
daylight.

The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing
it: “What is the theme of this story?”

Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it
and understand it. The theme of this story is: “Would you
rather be smart or happy?”

This is a work of propaganda. It’s a story about choosing
smarts over happiness. Except if I give the pencil a push: then
it’s a story about choosing happiness over smarts. It’s
a morality play, and the first character is about to take the
stage. He’s a foil for the theme, so he’s drawn in
simple lines. Here he is: